pretext as a bishop in the apostolical succession. And yet they were extreme ritualists, with whom the validity of the sacraments depended absolutely on consecration by an episcopally ordained priest. Here was a dilemma of vital consequence to the life of the Raskol. How was it to be met?
Two answers of opposite character were given to the question thus suddenly raised and urgently demanding immediate settlement. One was that priests must be obtained, and this course was found more or less practicable in course of time by renegades from orthodoxy deserting to the Raskol. But the more uncompromising Old Believers refused to admit the validity of the priestly grace of men who had been in the degenerate Church, and who were tainted by their usage of the corrected service books. These people came to the appalling conclusion that there was no true apostolic succession left in the world, no valid priesthood at all. The holy fire on the altar was extinguished; and there was nobody left capable of rekindling it. The two groups were known respectively as the Popòftsky, or "priest people," and the Bef-popòtsky or "no-priest people." Subdivisions followed, so that the Raskol cannot be regarded as a sect or denomination; it is an amorphous mass of very divergent sects that are out of communion with the State Church.
The Popòftsky long laboured under the disadvantage of depending for its ministry on the precarious chance of desertions from the orthodox Church. At length this humiliating and harassing condition has been superseded by the establishment of an independent episcopacy, and the Old Believers of the priest party now have their own ordained popes. In the year 1846 they obtained a metropolitan in the person of a Greek, Ambrose, formerly a bishop in Bosnia, who had been deposed by the patriarch of Constantinople. This man joined the Old Believers and was accepted by them as their ecclesiastical head. Unable to live in Russia, owing to the attitude of the government towards the Raskol, he settled at a place called "White Fountain," in Austria, near the Russian border. The
